If there’s one thing about jailbreaking my iOS devices that stands out to me most, it’s being able to customize the look and feel of iOS outside of Apple’s stock parameters. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of jailbreak tweaks that can do this, and new ones are seemingly being released every day.
In this piece, we’ll take a closer look at Colorful Widgets, a new free release by iOS developer Mateusz Morawski that colorizes your iPhone or iPad’s widgets with a whole host of different options.
Despite the relatively small number of redecorations the Cydia app has received over the last several years, it continues to be a reliable package manager today. Fortunately, Saurik (Jay Freeman) empowered developers to tweak and modify the Cydia app under Cydia Substrate starting in 2015.
Given the circumstances, the ball is very much in the jailbreak community’s court to make Cydia look and behave differently than it does out of the box, and that’s exactly what a free jailbreak tweak called CellDia by iOS developer Julio Verne attempts to accomplish as you’re about to witness.
Shortly after the Electra Team dropped a couple of updates for the Electra jailbreak tool, hacker and unc0ver lead developer Pwn20wnd released a duo of updates to the unc0ver jailbreak tool to the general public.
Pwn20wnd announced the updates Wednesday afternoon via Twitter, noting that it would resolve a problem with installing Cydia and extracting bootstrap upon jailbreaking. At the time of this writing, unc0ver v2.2.2 is now the latest public release:
It was only a few hours ago that the Electra Team released Electra 1.2.0 with preliminary support for iOS 11.4-11.4.1, and we’re already seeing some of the first updates to the iOS 11-centric jailbreak tool post-release.
The Electra Team announced the updates via Twitter Wednesday afternoon, highlighting some of the changes that come along with them:
Not long after the Electra Team released Electra version 1.2.0 with official support for iOS 11.4-11.4.1, hacker and uncover lead developer Pwn20wnd officially released unc0ver v2.2.0 to the masses and dropped the first unc0ver v3.0.0 pre-release in its wake.
Pwn20wnd made the announcements via Twitter Wednesday afternoon, noting that the unc0ver v3.0.0 pre-release is based off unc0ver v2.2.0 but with support for Brandon Azad’s voucher_swap exploit for A9/A9X/A10/A10X/A11 devices running iOS 11.4-11.4.1 in addition to the preexisting support for iOS 11.0-11.4 beta 3:
On Wednesday, the Electra Team released an updated version of the iOS 11-centric Electra jailbreak tool. Version 1.2.0 adds official support for iOS 11.4 and 11.4.1, making it the first public jailbreak tool to officially support these firmware versions.
The Electra Team made the announcement via Twitter, noting that Electra 1.2.0 uses a newer exploit dubbed voucher_swap. This exploit is allegedly more reliable than the traditional multi_path or VFS exploits that users have been relying on for months:
iOS’ notification system tends to be subtle enough that it can be easy to forget or miss an incoming notification. Fortunately, a free jailbreak tweak called BLightAlert by iOS developer Julio Verne can help mitigate this problem.
BLightAlert leverages your handset’s display backlight to grab your attention for incoming notifications. Once installed, the display brightness changes rapidly from low to high for a couple of seconds whenever an incoming notification rolls in, like so:
I snap so many screenshots on my iOS devices each day that even the world’s most renowned mathematicians would need a calculator to keep count, but the situation is intensified when I capture tall vertical interfaces; doing so often requires snapping several screenshots that will need to be stitched together in photo-editing software afterward.
If you’ve ever been in a similar predicament, then you know what a pain this can be and you’ll be ecstatic to know there’s another way. A free jailbreak tweak dubbed BigShotJb (iOS 11) by iOS developers tapthaker and Julio Verne lets you capture tall vertical screenshots just like the one in the example above with minimal effort.
Just over two weeks ago, it became known that hacking guru tihmstar was tinkering with a tfp0 exploit for iOS 11.4-11.4.1 devices of the A10 and earlier variety. But not long after finishing it, he opted not to release it, citing that ‘something cool’ would be coming instead.
Curiously, tihmstar appears to have undergone a change of heart on Tuesday after releasing his exploit to the public, a move that could reinforce existing iOS 11-centric jailbreak tools such as Electra and unc0ver:
Your iPhone’s Lock screen and Notification Center are each home to a specialized interface for displaying the date and time along with a list of information notifications – this interface is known as the Dashboard.
That said, if you’re feeling a bit bored with the stock look and feel of the Dashboard, then perhaps you should try a new free jailbreak tweak called DashBored (pun intended) by iOS developer Smokin1337. As shown in the screenshot examples above, this tweak lets you customize the Dashboard’s colors, font, notifications, text, and much more.
If you like how the Windows 10 Lock screen looks and feels, then you’ll probably enjoy using a jailbreak tweak called Ventana by iOS developers CoolStar and Jeremy Goulet. This tweak redesigns your iPhone or iPad’s Lock screen to make interface elements appear more as they would on a Windows 10 device.
Right out of the box, Ventana themes the Now Playing interface, any incoming notification banners you might have waiting for your attention, and the date and time display. Ventana also provides you with a Siri shortcut akin to the Cortana shortcut that you might find on Windows 10.
It’s been quite a few years since Apple has used the classic ‘slide to unlock’ interface on any of its mobile handsets, and with the advancements in biometric authentication and software since then it should be safe to say it isn’t coming back; at least not officially.
But if you’re feeling a bit nostalgic about the slide to unlock interface, then you’ll be thrilled to learn about a new free jailbreak tweak called Slyd (SlideToUnlock) by iOS developer Nepeta. Just as the name implies, this tweak ports the classic slide to unlock interface from iOS 7 to iOS 11.